The March 12, 2008, issue of USA Today ran a pretty sizable article on the Western Washington WMA Workshop and on WMA in general. There are always a few things that could be niggled about, but overall it's a great article, by a reporter who spent all weekend at the event and talked to tons of people. It's terrific exposure for the WMA community.

Sources for historical treatises

The Raymond J. Lord Collection is an online “digital archive of historical combat treatises dating primarily from the Renaissance” hosted by the Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies at the University of Massachusetts. They have more than two dozen freely downloadable PDFs.

Among the treasures of the Bavarian State Library (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek) in Munich is a two-volume Latin edition of Paulus Hector Mair's “Opus Amplissimum de Arte Athletica“ (“Ultimate Book of the Art of Athletics“), ca. 1550. This is a work that was written, metaphorically, in gold and blood, because Mair spent a fortune on it and was hanged at the age of 62 for embezzling municipal funds to amass that fortune. Scans of the two volumes in Munich are available here and here.

The historically most recent German manuscript linked here is Joachim Meyer's “Gründtliche Beschreibung der Kunst des Fechten” (“Fundamental Descriptions of the Art of Fencing”) of 1570. This link is to the online PDF copy at Lund University, Lund, Sweden.

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Recommended Videos

Bartitsu, The Gentlemanly Art of Self Defence, a mini-documentary by WMAI contributor Tony Wolf about E.W. Barton-Wright's pioneering fusion of Japanese and European
fighting styles. For more on Bartitsu, see issue #1 of WMAI.